M45 is one of the most prominent objects in the night sky. To the naked eye, the Pleiades looks like a miniature Little Dipper. Observers with good vision will easily identify 7 stars, and this gives the Pleiades its nickname - the Seven Sisters. In actuality, the cluster contains over 1,000 stars.

The cluster is a very young cluster, and is dominated by hot, blue stars. M45 is passing through a dust cloud in the Milky Way. As a result, the blue light from the brightest stars reflects off the background dust, thus causing the blue nebulosity surrounding the cluster.

In this image, North is Up. This image is cropped to 95% of the original frame.

Although I've posted this image on my website, this image was captured and processed by my daughter, Valerie Rosen (with a little help from me). We were both very happy with how much of the faint outer dust regions Valerie was able to bring out, as well as some beautiful star color. Whlie Valerie has helped me with a few other images, this is the first one where she did everything from start to finish!

And...this image won first place in Astrophotogallery.org's Easy-Cluster category for January 2014!

Plus, Valerie's M45 image was also published in the April 2017 issue of Sky and Telescope magazine in their article entitled "Herschel's Ghosts" (p. 31)!!!